Question on the colors of the ST Desktop

[thedocbwarren]

Anyone have the reasons on why the ST used a white background vs black like older systems (8-bit) and the Amiga?  Mac did so to mimic paper (White with black pixels.)

 

Also what is the story behind using bright green as the desktop background color?

[WhataKowinkydink]

Yeah it always seemed an odd choice.   Hopefully someone who knows will chime in.

[TGB1718]

Atari ST Hi-Res monitor maybe, advertised as "Paper White", wouldn't have looked good if black background

[zzip]

I think they wanted to make it as Mac-like as they could.

 

Green color?  No idea!    At least they gave us a control panel to let us set our own preference

[leech]

The green background was because it launched on St. Patrick's Day.

 

(obviously kidding, I have no clue.  I swear I read about a reason at one point, but damned if I can remember why it was....)

Edit: I thought the LGD (little green desktop) site had a reasoning on it, but apparently it moved to atari.st and now seems to be in the 'going to be kept alive, but not updated' state as of last month, sad!  Though, it's been a while since I'd gone there looking for something.

Edited January 16 by leech

[+DarkLord]

Well, anytime the default choice of green as the ST's desktop color comes up, I've

always heard the explanation that (at least a part of it) was due to the fact that the

human eye can see more shades of green (and is more visible) than any other color

in the spectrum.

 

Now...did Atari really have that in mind when they picked green? Well, your guess is

as good as mine. 

 

 

[zzip]

8 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

Now...did Atari really have that in mind when they picked green? Well, your guess is

as good as mine. 

And did Atari choose it or did Digital Research?

 

I've never used GEM on PC, but every screenshot I've seen seems to have a blue or indigo background color.

[+DarkLord]

5 minutes ago, zzip said:

And did Atari choose it or did Digital Research?

 

I've never used GEM on PC, but every screenshot I've seen seems to have a blue or indigo background color.

 

As far as that goes, I have not a clue. Be interesting to find out though. 

 

[Atari030]

12 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Atari ST Hi-Res monitor maybe, advertised as "Paper White", wouldn't have looked good if black background

Pretty sure High Res does have a black background and Low/Med is white? Barse acwards. Black edges look a hell of a lot better on an LCD. Wish it could be easily changed for desktop use.

[Zogging Hell]

I believe the green colour was for RF TV viewability, kind of like the Amiga's blue background colour (although it technically is meant to be a slightly worse choice than blue). I think it actually works better on RF than the Amiga's blue, mainly due to the monochrome icons, not clashing horribly like that blue orange combo that pervades the Amiga's default colour scheme. The green does look a bit... ghastly... on a proper monitor though.

[Zogging Hell]

14 hours ago, Atari030 said:

Pretty sure High Res does have a black background and Low/Med is white? Barse acwards. Black edges look a hell of a lot better on an LCD. Wish it could be easily changed for desktop use.

I suppose the white does blend quite well with the menu bar though

[zzip]

18 hours ago, Atari030 said:

Pretty sure High Res does have a black background and Low/Med is white? Barse acwards. Black edges look a hell of a lot better on an LCD. Wish it could be easily changed for desktop use.

By default it's white background in all resolutions.   You can change this in the control panel accessory (if you have it installed).

[TGB1718]

18 hours ago, Atari030 said:

Pretty sure High Res does have a black background

I have one and it's default is white with black text as @zzip also says 

Edited January 17 by TGB1718

[leech]

4 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

I believe the green colour was for RF TV viewability, kind of like the Amiga's blue background colour (although it technically is meant to be a slightly worse choice than blue). I think it actually works better on RF than the Amiga's blue, mainly due to the monochrome icons, not clashing horribly like that blue orange combo that pervades the Amiga's default colour scheme. The green does look a bit... ghastly... on a proper monitor though.

There is the whole theory of colors being tied to emotions.  Think of the alternatives, you have Red (definitely considered an angry color) or Blue (calming) or Green... which I'm not sure what that would be tied to, but maybe more attention getting.  No clue if that's why though.

 

It is very likely though, as you said, it has more to do how it looks on RF vs monitors.  I started my ST journey with the Mega STe, which of course had the capability of changing the color and dithering pattern, I'd generally change it to blue and a lighter dithering so it wasn't so strong.  Even the green with the dithering looked much better than the earlier TOS machines with solid green.

[zzip]

13 minutes ago, leech said:

It is very likely though, as you said, it has more to do how it looks on RF vs monitors.  I started my ST journey with the Mega STe, which of course had the capability of changing the color and dithering pattern, I'd generally change it to blue and a lighter dithering so it wasn't so strong.  Even the green with the dithering looked much better than the earlier TOS machines with solid green.

since they switched to dithered, they must've known something was wrong?    For the Falcon, they eventually went with a more muted blue/green color

 

 

I did most of my actual work in monochrome, and used low res for games mostly so I didn't have to stare at the original green for too long.

[leech]

53 minutes ago, zzip said:

since they switched to dithered, they must've known something was wrong?    For the Falcon, they eventually went with a more muted blue/green color

 

 

I did most of my actual work in monochrome, and used low res for games mostly so I didn't have to stare at the original green for too long.

Would have been sweet if the newer TOS versions for the Falcon had been ported to the older STs.  At the very least, the TT030.  Granted, it would have also been nice if TOS 5.x had been released for the Falcon...

[Atari030]

I'd guess I have 20+ ST's of various types. I fixed an STFM last night and, it is black background on high res and white on low/med. No floppy attached at the time. Never owned an NTSC model if that is any different?

 

[thedocbwarren]

Back in the day I remember heard Sam's favorite color was green.  They are such bright colors by default as well vs IBM's 16 colors from CGA or old Commodore mud/chalk colors. I had assumed the white background for the color resolutions was, maybe, to hide the screen size in a CRT since you don't span edge to edge.  No other system I can remember seeing used this concept outside the Mac to use a white background vs black (or correctly stated dark blue for Amiga.)

 

Also, why on bloody hell did they not fix the aspect ratio in medium resolution to scale the desktop correctly?  They only made the desktop for square-ish pixels vs elongated ones!  Even in later machines it scales poorly (TT, Falcon.). WTH?  Assume this is a Digital Research issue.  I use to hack my neodesk icons to look right (before I got later STs.)

 

Best 'Medium' res desktop I've ever seen was GS/OS (maybe Lisa as well.)

[Tillek]

You people are seriously overthinking this.

 

Like all of Atari's engineering decisions, they went that way because the engineers asked the office hottie with the highly developed attributes what she preferred (as an excuse to talk to her) and this is what she picked.

 

[zzip]

12 hours ago, thedocbwarren said:

I had assumed the white background for the color resolutions was, maybe, to hide the screen size in a CRT since you don't span edge to edge.  No other system I can remember seeing used this concept outside the Mac to use a white background vs black (or correctly stated dark blue for Amiga.)

After the Mac released, GUIs became the 'Next Big Thing' in desktop computers.   Everybody and their brother was rushing to develop their own GUI environment.    And GUIs enabled the 'WYSIWYG' concept which was also hot at the time.  What you see (on screen) is what you get (on printout).   So black text on white (like paper) was just natural for this new paradigm. 

 

Most GUI designers took their cues from Mac and/or the Xerox Parc system before it.  Amiga was an odd one in the color scheme they used.   Most GUIs used a black on white scheme:  Windows 1.0,  GEOS for the c64, etc.  Also GEM itself was designed for PC.  Atari licensed it and provided an optimal color palette for it.   I think that explains the white background, but not necessarily the green

 

PC GEM:

 

 

 

 

[thedocbwarren]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

After the Mac released, GUIs became the 'Next Big Thing' in desktop computers.   Everybody and their brother was rushing to develop their own GUI environment.    And GUIs enabled the 'WYSIWYG' concept which was also hot at the time.  What you see (on screen) is what you get (on printout).   So black text on white (like paper) was just natural for this new paradigm. 

 

Most GUI designers took their cues from Mac and/or the Xerox Parc system before it.  Amiga was an odd one in the color scheme they used.   Most GUIs used a black on white scheme:  Windows 1.0,  GEOS for the c64, etc.  Also GEM itself was designed for PC.  Atari licensed it and provided an optimal color palette for it.   I think that explains the white background, but not necessarily the green

 

PC GEM:

 

 

 

 

There are so many aspects of the GEM desktop that is weird given what it was released on.  For example, PC versions and other platform versions were also on 640x200 resolutions and look terrible just like Medium res TOS.  Given this was more common than a VGA-like aspect, why the miss on design?  I always assumed this was due to lacking UI designers to both making the UI correct the aspect ratio, something Apple did not miss.

Edited January 18 by thedocbwarren
typo

[zzip]

2 minutes ago, thedocbwarren said:

There are so many aspects of the GEM desktop that is weird given what it was released on.  For example, PC versions and other platform versions were also on 640x200 resolutions and look terrible just like Medium res TOS.  Given this was more common than a VGA-like aspect, why the miss on design?  I always assumed this was due to lacking UI designers to both making the UI correct the aspect ratio, something Apple did not miss.

Apple controlled their own hardware which gave them an advantage.   Something like GEM is designed to be resolution independent to scale to arbitrary future resolutions,  but new graphics standards were being released all the time,  The early GUIs didn't have aspect-ratio settings or DPI settings.    Most displays were 4:3 or at least had squarish pixels.

 

640x200 was never an ideal graphics mode.   It mainly existed because people wanted 80 columns of text,  but the RGB monitors and other common display types of the era couldn't do much more than 200 lines.   Also at some point Atari forked GEM from DR and continued development on their own, for their own needs.   Atari's GEM needed to fit on 192K ROM with the rest of the OS-  so I assume they didn't have room or time to implement quality-of-life features like aspect-corrected medium res?  It would have been nice though!  I always hated working in Med Res, and that was one of the reasons.

[stirrell]

Sorry for a tangent, but working on the ST in medium res kind of jogged a memory for me and got me wondering. Were Atari computers the only computers that had audio for key presses? The 8-bits did this and the ST did this… did any other computers use speaker audio for key press feedback?

 

The sound picked for the ST could have been a little less jarring, IMO.

[Cyprian]

16 hours ago, thedocbwarren said:

There are so many aspects of the GEM desktop that is weird given what it was released on.  For example, PC versions and other platform versions were also on 640x200 resolutions and look terrible just like Medium res TOS.  Given this was more common than a VGA-like aspect, why the miss on design?  I always assumed this was due to lacking UI designers to both making the UI correct the aspect ratio, something Apple did not miss.

GEM screen resolution depends on the capabilities of the graphics card, at that time (1985) 640x200 was quite popular. I see there https://www.seasip.info/Gem/Drivers/video.html drivers for GEM 1.x for e.g. Hercules 720x348

 

Actually PC GEM 1.1 in 640x200 wasn't so bad:

 

 

 

On 1/16/2024 at 10:28 AM, thedocbwarren said:

Anyone have the reasons on why the ST used a white background vs black like older systems (8-bit) and the Amiga?  Mac did so to mimic paper (White with black pixels.)

Digital Research Inc designed GEM in that way that, based on XEROX experiences.

 

On 1/16/2024 at 10:28 AM, thedocbwarren said:

Also what is the story behind using bright green as the desktop background color?

Regarding green desktop, if I remember correctly the first 16 colors in GEM were standardized by Digital Research. Blue was reserved for PC GEM, therefore Atari didn't have much choice:

 

PC GEM:

ST GEM:

 

 

 

Edited January 19 by Cyprian

[thedocbwarren]

10 hours ago, Cyprian said:

GEM screen resolution depends on the capabilities of the graphics card, at that time (1985) 640x200 was quite popular. I see there https://www.seasip.info/Gem/Drivers/video.html drivers for GEM 1.x for e.g. Hercules 720x348

 

Actually PC GEM 1.1 in 640x200 wasn't so bad:

 

 

 

Digital Research Inc designed GEM in that way that, based on XEROX experiences.

 

Regarding green desktop, if I remember correctly the first 16 colors in GEM were standardized by Digital Research. Blue was reserved for PC GEM, therefore Atari didn't have much choice:

 

PC GEM:

ST GEM:

 

 

 

Yup, it looks like GEM was actually made for that res in your example.  This is what I'm talking about.  Medium res on the ST looks poor, lazy, and an after-thought at best.  If they had used even the basic look of PC GEM it would have been an improvement.